After disabling the ADC the power consumption during sleep went down to 40uA, right at my goal. So the extra effort is really in how to 'tweak' the Trinket platform as close to 40uA as possible.ĭoing some research I found out the disabling the ADC was really key in improving the 'sleep' consumption.

For me this meant that the Trinket platform should be able to achieve somewhere around 35-45uA power consumption in sleep mode, which was more than adequate for my needs.

The regulator used on the Trinket platform draws about 30-40uA (in sleep/standby).

While this was a worthy reduction in and of itself, the MCU datasheet shows that if I optimize things out I should achieve somewhere below 10uA for the MCU. Putting the device to sleep dropped the power consumption to roughly 270uA. After removing the power LED (R4 and/or PWR LED) the power dropped to around 5mA. I started with close to 9mA of power consumption initially and after all the reconfigurations ended with about 40uA while the Trinket was in sleep mode.įor my +3.3V Trinkets the initial power draw I found to be around 9mA. My ultimate goal was to re-create a low power remote sensor I had made (using PIC MCU and my own board) which I could run for months on AAA batteries. My goal on this article is to provide some simple guidelines on how to achieve low power with Adafruit's Trinket platform. But at this price point it is hard to justify spending the time to do so unless one is trying to go into a high number of copies of the same design. Of course one can customize your own mini platform with better I/O and just the right functions. For close to $5 you get an MCU in a board with pinouts, USB power, and Arduino support. The Adafruit Trinket platform ( ) is a neat small, Arduino compatible, microcontroller platform.

Adafruit trinket 5v easy projects